WWI and the Literary Imagination

HUM 2213: British and American Literature IISpring 2015Dr. Perdigao

January 14-16, 2015

Modernization• From Victorian to modern

• Modernization, modernity, modernisms

• Morality: aestheticism, “art for art’s sake”

• Education Act of 1870 in England—universal compulsory elementary education

• Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, changing times with fin de siècle

• Between Victorian and modern—pessimism and stoicism

• Social and technological change, mass relocation of populations by war, empire, and economic migration, mixing of cultures and classes in expanding cities

Ch-ch-changes• Electricity, cinema and radio, new pharmaceuticals developed (Greenblatt 1829)

• Wireless communication, Wright Brothers flew first airplane (1903), Model T as first mass produced car (1913) (1829)

• Modernity “disrupted the old order, upended ethical and social codes, cast into doubt previously stable assumptions about self, community, the world, and the divine” (1828)

• Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in 1900• Foundations of psychoanalysis

• Max Planck’s quantum theory (1900) and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity (1905)

• Emphasis on uses of the past, ideas about the future (1829):• Yeats’ line “Things fall apart / the centre cannot hold”• Eliot’s “still point of the turning world” • Ezra Pound’s directive to “Make it new”

• Gender constructs: Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882; women at university; suffragettes, women’s suffrage in 1918 for women 30 and over, 1928 for 21 and over (1830)

Nation and Identity• Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902): Britain and two republics, Orange Free State and

South African Republic (Transvaal Republic), ends in British Victory

• Edward VII (1901-1910): Edwardian period; sense of change and liberation (Greenblatt 1830)

• George V, king in 1910, Silver Jubilee in 1935, died 1936, succeeded by son Edward VIII; Georgian period, lull before WWI (1830)

• Effects of WWI in poetry by Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg representing “major shifts in attitude toward Western myths of progress and civilization” (1830), disillusionment to follow

• Beginning of WWI, nearly quarter of earth’s surface and world’s population under British dominion (1830)

• Imperialist and anti-imperialist sentiments, independent nations under British Commonwealth

• Irish nationalism• Easter Rising (1916)—revolt in Dublin • Southern counties Irish Free State (1921-22), Northern Ireland remained part of

Great Britain (1831)

Poetics• Imagist movement, developed in London: “direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether

subjective or objective’” (Greenblatt 1834)

• Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot—American poets abroad

• Return to metaphysical poetry, John Donne’s 17th century poetics

• Irony, wit, puns

• Eliot—synthesis of metaphysical poetry, French symbolist, complexity, irony

• Influence from art—French impressionist, postimpressionist, cubist painters, modern music

Narratology• 1920s—high modernism, “personal and textual inwardness, complexity, and

difficulty” (Greenblatt 1838): “shattering of confidence in the old certainties about the deity and the Christian faith, about the person, knowledge, materialism, history, the old grand narratives” (1838)

• New ideas about language as transparent medium, self as knowable, authority of writer, narrator, ordering of narrative (beginning, middle, ending)

• Emphasis on perception, stream of consciousness techniques

• 1930s and 1940s, “reaction against modernism,” “return to social realism, moralism, and assorted documentary endeavors” (1838)

• 1960s onward, after collapse of British Empire, urban, proletarian, provincial English (e.g., northern), regional (e.g., Scottish and Irish), immigrant, postcolonial, feminist, gay perspectives asserted alongside a “continuing self-consciousness about language and form and meaning,” the “enduring legacy of modernism” (1838)

• Postmodernism and postcolonialism

• Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence—creating the “modernist ‘English’ novel” (1838)

Remembrance• Twentieth century—modern, contemporary in American; post-War British

• Freud—mourning and melancholia, no visible body after the war

• Over 9 million soldiers killed in WWI (1 in 5)

• From patriotic poems to poems questioning idea of war versus reality

• Memorialization—how to represent loss

• Cenotaph of Whitehall and Menin Gate

• Writer Rudyard Kipling, member of the War Graves Commission, chose phrase “The Glorious Dead” for the Cenotaph (empty grave) in London; Tomb of the Unknown Warrior nearby at Westminster Abbey

• Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in Ypres, Belgium, designed 1921, opened 1927, “To the greater glory of God,” “He is not missing. He is here.”

Memorialization

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)• Son of headmaster, Rugby School, went on to King’s College, Cambridge• Published first book of poems in 1911• Joined Royal Navy Division’s Antwerp expedition 1914• Writing during 1914• Dies on way to Gallipoli of blood poisoning and dysentery• First of the war poets to die, never experienced trench warfare; romanticism and

idealism in his war poems• Yeats described him as “the handsomest man in England”• Buried in Skyros, Greece

• “The Soldier”• http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15695

• Obituary: http://net.lib.byu.edu/english/WWI/poets/rbobituary.html • On Skyros: http://www.rupertbrookeonskyros.com/ • Skyros—Homer, where Achilles hides to avoid entering war

Romanticizing the war and poetry

Memorializing Brooke

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)• Son of Alfred Sassoon and Theresa Thorneycroft

• Educated at Marlborough College and Clare College, Cambridge, studied law and history

• Out of patriotism, enlists, but kept from fighting because of broken arm

• Brother Hamo killed at Gallipoli

• Fought at Mametz Wood and in Somme Offensive in July 1916

• Earned Military Cross, nickname “Mad Jack”

• Returned to England 1917 after struck by sniper’s bullet

• Protest against war, authorities claim shell shock, is sent to Craiglockhart hospital near Edinburgh

• Throws Military Cross into river before returning to duty

• Returned to Western Front in 1918, wounded, sent home; Owen killed in 1918

• Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration (1991) based on Sassoon’s life, time in hospital

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)• “They”• http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/they

Psychoanalyzing Siegfried Sassoon

Remembering Sassoon

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)• Born in Oswestry, North of England; attended Birkenhead Institute and Shrewsbury

Technical College

• Family circumstances, after death of grandfather, moved to Birkenhead

• Family could not afford tuition, failed to gain scholarship to University of London, worked as assistant to clergyman in 1913; took classes part-time at University of Reading; worked as teacher in France

• Returned home in 1915, enlisted in Artists Rifles; began training course in Manchester Regiment, commissioned second lieutenant

• 1917 shipped out, four months on front line; shell-shock, sent to Craiglockhart

• Had been writing Romantic poems, shifts after war experience; “recuperates but distorts the conventions of the pastoral elegy, relocating them to scenes of terror, extreme pain, and irredeemable mass death” (Greenblatt 1971).

• Returned to his regiment in November 1917, back to France, earned Military Cross in September 1918, killed November 4, 1918

• Telegram sent to parents on day Armistice ending the war is signed, November 11, 1918

• Poetry collection edited, introduced by Sassoon

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)• “Dulce et Decorum Est”• http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19389

Remembering Owen

Memorializing Owen

Poets’ Corner

Remembrance• Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey

• Memorial for 16 Great War Poets, unveiled on November 11, 1985, 67th anniversary of the Armistice

• Inscription by Wilfred Owen: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

• Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen memorialized

Freudian Slippage

Freud and Pop Culture

War culture• http://www.usmm.org/posterbuild1a.html

• http://www.iwm.org.uk/